Dear Iya
By Uliyaah
I want to save us both some time.
You believe that your choices have always been completely your own. It’s your choice to do your best at school even if it costs you your health and friends. It’s your choice to strive to get into a good college. It's your choice to follow the path of least resistance because it's comfortable, not because you have to.
But why did you make these choices? Did you want to succeed in school solely because you enjoyed the challenge of taking rigorous classes?
No. You want to succeed so you can live a life of privilege. So you can live without worrying about your next meal. So you can live.
Is it really your choice when the options only seem to be to succeed or die?
Of course I seem a little dramatic. You won’t really die if you fail to succeed. You have family who will support you and friends who will empathize with you. But to you, it feels the same as dying. Receiving help from others feels like the death of your pride. The death of the independent persona you put on. The death of you.
What drives you is not happiness or the pursuit of it, but the fear that you will not live up to the expectations set before you, that are never even explicitly said but always felt.
This is something you try your best not to think about. But please, think deeper.
No one has ever said the words “succeed or die” to you, but sometimes that's how it feels. You see your classmates almost proud of how little sleep they got so that they could finish their homework or study more for an exam, and you begin to hold your academic success over your health as if it grants you the same bragging rights. You bond with your friends over the near mental breakdown you had during an excruciating exam and never stop to wonder why you all are so emotionally and mentally affected by a single grade.
It’s clear why you tolerate, and even accept, this abuse.
We are scared of the shame and pity we will receive from friends and family, from even strangers and acquaintances, if we do fail. The fear that if you failed a class in high school you’d end up being a “super senior”, mocked behind your back and kindly teased to your face without consideration of your experiences. You fear that if you don’t go to a good college, you will not be living up to the idea you have of yourself. The idea you have been told. You have always been praised for your academic success, your drive, your obedience. Who are you without these things?
You are scared.
Scared that without these things you are nothing.
You fear knowing yourself because you have never been given the opportunity to do so. You have always justified putting your academic success above all else, including yourself. Being told to always consider delayed gratification over instant, you have neglected exploring things that draw your attention away from this path of “delayed gratification”, seeing it as a distraction that takes away from your productivity.
You have ignored your own curiosity for so long that you are unable to identify it as such. You have always believed that the pure curiosity you felt as a child was gone, but it’s not. You have just mistaken it as unproductivity.
This is not your fault.
And I don’t want you to think that you are the one who killed your curiosity. You are under so many different societal pressures to be “productive” in order to be what is seen as successful in life. It’s incredibly difficult to break out of this mold you have been placed in. But I want you to find yourself. Build yourself back up from the mold you have been placed in.
It isn’t selfish to live for yourself in mind. And I want you to live for yourself.
At the same time, I don’t want it to feel like another pressure that pushes you to follow yet another seemingly endless path put together by a stranger. I want you to pave your own way through your life. It’s fine if it looks different from others. It’s fine if it looks the same. As long as you know it’s the one you want to take, which I know can be almost impossible to figure out. But just take small steps.
Try to take your time when you can. Give yourself time to think. Reflect on the small things you do. And allow yourself to fail, I promise you won’t die.
Don’t be scared of yourself. You are worth knowing. I just wish I could’ve known you better when I was you.
Treat yourself well,
Uliyaah